How Elevators Changed the World | Origins: The Journey of Humankind

For millennia, we wanted buildings that could scrape the sky, touch the heavens. But the heights we hoped to scale were limited by the shortcomings of our construction materials and the weakness of the human body. When steel and concrete came on the scene in the late 19th century, we finally had the tools to build tall.

We lacked one key piece of technology—something we all take for granted today. Before we had skyscrapers, we could only build to approximately seven stories. Part of it was because of mass construction, but part of it was also because of the human limits of how far we would climb stairs.

So, we would climb stairs; maybe we would get to seven stories and we would be out of breath. So then you needed this transport system. One of the most critical developments that allowed for skyscrapers to happen was the Otis elevator. We take elevators for granted today, but when they first came into existence, people couldn't believe it.

In the mid-1800s, people did not ride on elevators because they were unsafe. Elevators were an industrial invention; they moved factory goods from floor to floor via a rope. The invention of the safety brake in 1853 kind of turned that on its head. When that rope broke, the platform with all of the goods was immediately prevented from falling.

Four years later, the first passenger lift was installed. It just seemed unbelievably fantastic. Tourists to America in the 1850s and 60s went out of their minds when they encountered an elevator. There's a story of the Duke of Devonshire, who went to New York, and he tried an elevator. Then he wrote home to his family to say, "I just rode on a vertical railroad."

The invention of the safety elevator enabled the opportunity to go tall. We saw the change from the most desirable space being at the bottom of the building to now, the floors at the top of the building—above the noise and the smell and with the ability to have a view and more natural light.

So we see the urbanization, the trend of putting more people in a smaller space evolving to be a vertical space—to what we see today: 150, 160, to 100-story tall buildings. [Music]